The Bay Area’s Real-Estate Bubble, from Both Sides

When Twitter went public, earlier this month, tenants’-rights activists gathered to picket the company’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco. They wielded signs reading “#gentrification” and a coffin that said “R.I.P. Affordable Housing.” Earlier this year, the backlash against a recent tech invasion of the city was even less subtle: activists beat a piñata in the shape of one of the buses Google uses to shuttle workers from San Francisco to its Mountain View headquarters.

The reason for the nativist rage is grounded in real estate: San Francisco and its immediate neighbors are in the midst of a real-estate boom, or a crisis, depending on whether you’re on the writing or receiving end of the rent check. Lured by tax breaks and the tech boom, Internet companies have been scooping up the city’s commercial space, and many of their generously compensated employees have flooded into the city’s limited apartment stock. As of October, San Francisco was the most expensive rental market in the country, with a median rent of three thousand two hundred and fifty dollars for a two-bedroom apartment. (New York was close behind.)

Tenant lawyers show a map with evicted residents relocating to New York, Florida, Hawaii, and even out of the country. Others have ventured across the Bay for the slightly cheaper—but also rising—rents of Oakland and Berkeley. “If I didn’t have this place, I couldn’t afford to stay here,” Sara Shortt, the director of a nonprofit that advocates for tenants’ rights in San Francisco, told me, echoing many other inhabitants of rent-controlled apartments.

Tell me about it. While I don’t need anyone’s sympathy—reserve it for the long-time San Franciscans who are losing their homes and the low-income families unable to find a stable place to live—I happen to be among the displaced. After I was asked to leave my sweet, five-hundred-dollar, rent-controlled room in San Francisco earlier this year by my married master tenants who (understandably) wanted to reclaim their garden-view bedroom, I struck out in the Craigslist cattle call for affordable pads in San Francisco. So I headed to Berkeley, reduced to a commuter in the city that I cover as a reporter and, for the past six years, have loved with all my gut.

But when my housemate in the new Berkeley apartment told me earlier this month that she was moving out on her own, my viewpoint shifted: the market morphed from foe to ally. I was suddenly the keeper of the keys to a nine-hundred-dollar Bay Area bedroom, albeit an unfurnished one with a wall composed largely of two bookshelves.

Apartment-seekers elsewhere would laugh me out of the apartment’s other small bedroom. My brother paid about as much for a faux-adobe three-bedroom house in Albuquerque. Instead, I’ve received forty-five replies to my Craigslist advertisements this month. One twenty-six-year-old promised Mini Cooper rides. A Ph.D. student tried to woo me with a couch, a rocking chair, and a KitchenAid mixer. An undergrad offered to help me with the garden (I don’t have one). One marijuana grower said he’d bring an undisclosed amount of “cash in hand”—“just to hold a spot.”

The room I listed was not in San Francisco either, and there was the matter of the bookshelf wall. But it was spacious and offered hardwood floors, a fireplace, inset wooden shelving, and windows looking out on green space. The Craigslist masses loved it.

My e-mail inbox bulged with messages from eager-to-please strangers: “I Think We’d Be A GREAT FIT!” exclaimed the subject line of one. Their personalities were cultivated to be inoffensive: one said he could “accommodate to any kind of environment and/or situation,” others were “communication forward but also really flexible,” and “tidy (but not rigid),” or “social but I also treasure my quiet downtime,” and “not a woman, but definitely a good backup!”

There was a greeting-card designer, a violin maker, a few social workers, a labor-union campaign manager, a preschool teacher, and a twenty-four-year-old wunderkind already in her third year of a Ph.D. program. One mother wanted to share the room with her nine-year-old son. One man wanted to room with his older sister. A Berkeley graduate student sat on my couch and regaled me with horror stories: “At one open house, I was asked if I had a talent.” A twenty-six-year-old who was trying to move out of her parents’ place recalled a San Francisco open house for a fourteen-hundred-dollar room in a bare-bones apartment with two housemates: a Google worker offered two years of rent upfront, and the prospective housemates ushered everyone else out. A hip forty-year-old health-clinic worker said she excitedly checked out a nine-hundred-dollar “studio” in Oakland. It was a garage.

A twenty-nine-year-old working two jobs as a waiter wrote, “I’m coming to terms with the fact that if I want more than 200 square feet, I better find a roomie.” After I wrote him back, he divulged the reason he had written such a thorough and personalized response to my ad: “When I first came out here, I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting any responses. I actually put up a mock ad within the same price range I was looking for to see what other people were saying. After a couple hours, I had close to 50 emails in my box. I felt a little guilty. However, it was sort of a way to elevate myself above my competition.” Sly.

Then in walked a twenty-seven-year-old technical director at an animation company who earned eighty-five thousand dollars a year. Relations with the landlord at her shared three-bedroom in San Francisco had decayed, and she had to move out. This tech worker was the least politically correct candidate Craigslist could have sent to my doorstep—the embodiment of the twentysomething-earning-three-times-her-age cliché that San Francisco is blaming all its problems on. Now here she was, trying to displace desperate grad students just holding on in Berkeley.

I loved her immediately.

I’m not going to solve the rent crisis in my apartment. Any housemate of mine will get added to my lease and bestowed with Berkeley’s ironclad tenant protections. I have to really, really like her. This particular techie was into rock-climbing, dance, and Russian classes. She seemed laid-back yet direct; someone who wouldn’t go passive-aggressive about the occasional dirty dish in the sink. By the end of the half-hour-long interview, she was starting sentences with promising phrases like “If I were to move in …” The next morning, I offered her the room.

Then, after a two-day wait, came her e-mail reply: “I thought about it for a while, but I started to feel more and more like I wasn’t ready to give up the city yet :/ ” My hope was dashed with an emoticon. She ended up going with an illegal sublet in a fourteen-hundred-dollar studio in the heart of San Francisco.

I went back to Craigslist for another round of takers, responding to the woman who claimed we’d be a GREAT FIT. After meeting her, I realized she was right. She was a liberal-arts grad student who had seen where the market was heading and got a job in human resources at a tech company downtown. I offered her the place.